RUSSIA'S TINDERBOX - Belfer Center for Science and International ...

PREFACE
Background to the Report
In the Summer of 1993, the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project began an inquiry
into the conflicts in Russia’s North Caucasus region, as part of a broader study of post-Soviet ethnopolitical
conflicts. In the course of this inquiry, it became apparent that there were practically no
contemporary English-language studies of the North Caucasus. Although the new Transcaucasian
states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were beginning to be studied more closely as a
consequence of their new status as independent states after 1991, information on the Russian North
Caucasus region was only available from news wires and the occasional flying visits of Western
correspondents. This was in spite of the prevalence of violent conflict in the Caucasus as a whole,
the involvement of North Caucasian groups in these conflicts, and Chechnya’s 1991 declaration of
independence from the Russian Federation.
By 1993, Azerbaijan and Armenia had been in a de facto state of war over Nagorno-
Karabakh for almost five years; an armed conflict had flared between Georgia and South Ossetia
sending a wave of refugees into North Ossetia in the North Caucasus; North Caucasian mercenaries
were fighting on the side of Abkhazia in its war with Georgia; and a violent conflict had erupted
within the North Caucasus itself between Ossetians and Ingush. In acknowledgement of these
developments, a number of prominent Russian institutes in Moscow, such as Valery Tishkov’s
Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Grigory Yavlinsky’s EPIcenter, and Ol’ga Vasil’eva’s
North-South Center, had begun to produce surveys of the North Caucasus region and the ethnopolitical
situation in individual republics. These were not generally translated into English,
however, and were not available to the majority of Western analysts and policymakers.
In response to this information vacuum, the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project
began its own study of the North Caucasus region in the Spring of 1994, under the direction of its
Associate Director, Fiona Hill, and with the assistance of a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of
New York. The aim of the study was to build on the existing Russian-language and Englishlanguage
literature, conduct new research, and produce a comprehensive analysis of conflict in the
North Caucasus for a Western audience that would explain both the importance of the region for the
Russian Federation and the sources and triggers of violence. This report is the culmination of the
study which concluded in July 1995.
The report draws on new data and interview material from the North Caucasus collected by
Dr. Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov, a senior researcher at the Institute of History, Archaeology
and Ethnography in Makhachkala, Dagestan and an advisor to the government of Dagestan on ethnic
issues in the republic. Dr. Magomedkhanov was a visiting scholar at Harvard from March to June
1995 and prepared background material for the study during his stay.
A small Working Group of specialists from the Harvard community was also convened by
the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project to provide input into the North Caucasus study
and to comment on its findings. This group included Ivan Ascher, Sergei Grigoriev, Pamela Jewett,
Aliona Kostritsyna, and Matthew Lantz of the Project’s research staff; Brian Boeck from the
Harvard History Department, Nicholas Daniloff from Northeastern University, Ruth Daniloff, John